!"#$%&'(&)%*+,#$+-!.&/%0%1,#234&5--%62784&*39&:2-20*+(,&"*+6;,%7
5+,;27<(=.&>*+7#?#2&@#*32
A2+70%.&B#-C&D+*7,%7-84&@2-E&FG4&H2E&I&<5+,+C34&IJJJ=4&11E&KLMGN
O+P-#(;%9&P8.&Q3#R%7(#,8&2$&S*-#$273#*&O7%((
A,*P-%&Q/".&http://www.jstor.org/stable/3697210
500%((%9.&IKTUVTKUUJ&KI.NF
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucal.
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the
scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that
promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Film
Quarterly.
http://www.jstor.org
Maurizio Viano
0
S
Reception,
Allegory,
Beautifu
and
Holocaust
Roberto Benigni in Life Is Beautiful
26
Laughter
Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard
and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into
my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the
wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight
everywhere. Lifeis beautiful.Let the future generations cleanse
it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.
-Leon Trotsky
In a 1987 essay entitled "HolocaustLaughter,"TerrenceDes Presnotes that"oneof the surprisingcharacteristics of the film Shoah is how often Claude
Lanzmannandsome of his witnessestakeup a sardonic
tone, a kind of mocking irony that on occasion comes
close to laughter."(279) Observing that Lanzmann
"seemsdeliberateaboutit,"Des Presconcludesthat"if
Shoahis a sign of the times, we may supposethatartistic representationof the Holocaust is changing-that
it is trying a more flexible mode of response." (280)
Ten years later,two films would prove his uncannyintuition right: Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful and
Radu Mihaileanu's Trainof Life.1Whereas the latter
has not thus far raisedmuch controversy,Life Is Beautiful has been and is the focus of unbridledmedia attention,enormouspopularsuccess, surprisingindustry
recognition (in the Oscars awardedto Roberto Begnini), and some astonishingcritical venom.
The Award for the Best Jewish Experience, obtainedby Benigni's daringprojectat the JerusalemInternationalFilmFestivalin 1998,is truly"ablasphemy,"
for "theHolocaustmisrepresentationsof Life Is Beautiful"are "unforgivablyobscene";but "thereare further horrorsbeyond the movie: ahistoric film critics
who slaverover it, fuzzy-thinkingcrowdswho embrace
it," and favorable Jewish re/viewers "who definitely
shouldknow better."Thus ends GeraldPeary'sreview
in the Boston Phoenix, leaving those who "don'thave
the honorof being Jewish"with no choice but feeling
intimidated.2That moral intimidationis Peary's strategy is clear from his review's opening move: "Peary?
My family name was Pisarevsky,changed at Ellis Island by American officials. My parentsare RussianbornJews. Whatyou see below is, I suppose,an angry
Jewish column."Peary's anger,however, is less cognitive thanrhetorical,a justificationfor dismissing the
film and its authorwhile feeling good about it. Peary
even calls Benigni, whose fatherspent two years in a
Nazi labor camp, a "revisionist."3
Peary's is but the extreme case in a series of negative reviews that appearedin several majorpublications (e.g., the Village Voice, Time, and The New
Republic) upon the film's release in the U.S.4 Their dis-
missal of Life Is Beautiful often adopts Peary's strategy of moral indignation. Only J. Hoberman, in the
Voice,attempteda readingof the film, his angerbeing
a cognitivetool thatproducestextualknowledgerather
than moral outcry. Consistent with his premises, he
drags Spielberg along with Benigni into the mud, for
"it was Schindler's List that made mass extermination safe for mass consumption."
However, the existence of a very large numberof
non-angryJewishre/viewersbelies the assumptionthat
being Jewish should automaticallylead to hatingLife
Is Beautiful. AbrahamFoxman, directorof the AntiDefamationLeague, was approachedby leadersof the
Italian-Jewishcommunity concerned by and divided
on Life Is Beautiful. Before viewing it, Foxman
27
Giorgio Cantarini and Benigni
remarked that a comic film set in Auschwitz "cannot
be done, [it] is trivializing."-(Kotzin 44) He changed
his mind afterwards: "The film is so poignant, it is so
sensitive, it is so informed by creative genius, that the
answer is-I give it a wholehearted endorsement."
(Kotzin 45) Likewise, in the Jerusalem Report, Daniel
Kotzin argued, "Throughout, Benigni is walking the
thinnest of lines-taking the risk in almost every camp
scene of lapsing into the offensive, of cheapening his
subject. It would take only one false note, one poorly
judged wisecrack, to destroy the delicate fabric. Yet extraordinarily-the more so, given Benigni's madcap
movie-star persona-there are no slips, the poignant
balance is maintained." (41)
Lest we too believe, with Peary, that Jews favorable to the film "should know better," attitudes towards
Life Is Beautiful depend less on whether you're Jewish
or Gentile than on other factors. In most cases, appreciation of Life Is Beautiful is made difficult, if not impossible, by the presence of an obstacle that often goes
unremarked. To understand the nature of this obstacle,
let us look at the group constituted by all those who
write or talk about films from a position of some authority, from local or campus paper reviewers to acad28
emic scholars and highbrow critics. An examination of
the critical judgments on Life Is Beautiful, conventionally framed within a low-, middle-, and highbrow
hierarchy, reveals that, within the limits inherent in
all generalizations, the higher the re/viewer's position the more negative the re/view. A case in point is
what happened in Boston and New York. The two major
newspapers, the Boston Globe and the New YorkTimes,
wrote about the film in enthusiastic terms. The weekly
"cultural"magazines aiming at more sophisticated readers, the Boston Phoenix and the Village Voice, panned
it. Likewise, most of the film scholars that I have interviewed either shrugged their shoulders or expressed
contempt. Students, on the other hand, were enthusiastic, and so were several academics from disciplines
other than Film Studies (including Jewish Studies). We
are faced, then, with an obstacle that does not affect
popular or non-specialized audiences and those who
negotiate film ratings for them, an obstacle to which
middle- to highbrow film authorities are more vulnerable. This is not surprising, for the obstacle belongs
to the slippery terrain that the French sociologist Bourdieu ascribes to habitus as "the incorporated form of
one's class position and the conditionings imposed
by it," i.e., taste. (112) Taking Life Is Beautiful seriously goes against high cultural taste.
Taste, Bourdieu never tires of repeating, is economic and cultural capital made body. Academic film
scholars and highbrow critics (people like Peary and
me) usually belong to "the fractions (relatively) richest in cultural capital and (relatively) poorest in economic capital." Artistic consumption is for us one of
the most distinctive sociocultural practices. It yields
distinction in the form of symbolic profit/status and
distinguishes us from those who don't know better. By
displaying refined tastes in the arts, we constantly (re)define and (re)position ourselves.
What is at stake is indeed "personality," i.e.,
the quality of the person which is affirmed in
the capacity to appropriate an object of quality. The objects endowed with the greatest distinctive power are those which most clearly
attest the quality of their appropriation, that is
the quality of those who appropriate them, because their appropriation demands time and
skills that, insofar as they require a long investment of time-like musical or pictorial culture-cannot be acquired in haste or by proxy,
and which therefore appear as the surest indications of the intrinsic qualities of the person." (319-20)
We tend thereforeto valorize those films whose con- edy by reframing topical issues through the subversumptionindicates that we do not fall for the tempta- sive lens of laughter.WithJohnnyStecchino(1991), for
tions of the entertainmentindustry (sentimentalism, example, he confrontedone of Italy's worst scourges,
media-hype,easy-to-understand
plots, immediateplea- the Mafia.(Accordingto UmbertoEco, Benigni'ssatire
sures).To complicatethings further,we do not appre- of a Mafioso's masculinitywas an effective deterrent
ciatebeingremindedof all this, as if acknowledgingthe againstthe fascinationthatthe gangsterimage exertson
social function of our culturalhabits diminishedtheir young men-more effective thanthe countlessrealistic
value. Ourtastes,choices, andreactionsmustappearto films made on the subject.[author'spersonalrecollecbe the resultof freedom,talent,and intelligencerather tion]) In II Mostro (The Monster, 1994), his depiction
thansocioculturallogic, apprenticeship,andprivilege. of a pettythief mistakenfor a serialrapistwas in many
Benigni's physical comic style has little poten- ways a regressionto his earlierstyle of predominantly
tialfor yieldingsuchdistinction.In Italy,
sexualjokes. On thatoccasion,Benigni
his films do have a mass following, but
spoke of "the big challenge of transare
shunned
"serithey
commonly
by
forminga dramaticsubjectinto a comConvir 1C ed that
ous"critics.Indeed,dignifiedaloofness
edy."(Benigni,www2) LifeIs Beautiful
typifies high culture's reception of
constitutesBenigni's attemptto maxi"lauglht:er can
Benigni's films. For example, the inI,,
Benigni mize thischallengeandprovehis comeBenigni
tellectually sophisticated Italian film
Bengni' dies' potentialonce and for all: "I had
C(omedy's
resents
Duel
did
not
offer
a
substantive
this strong desire to put myself, my
journal
of
Is
comicpersona,in an extremesituation";
role.
ar
ancill; y
reading Life Beautiful(which they
had done for Titanic). Likewise, in
and "the ultimateextreme situationis
theextermination
France, the prestigious Cahiers du
camp,almostthe symCinema refused to give Life Is Beautibol of ourcentury,the negativeone, the
ful even the negative recognition of an attack,as tes- worst thing imaginable."(Stanley 44) The Holocaust
tifiedby ThierryJousse'sreportfromCannes:"Atotally thenis not an end buta means-"I did not wantto make
disproportionedJury'sspecial GrandPrizefor Roberto a film aboutthe Holocaust"(Stanley45)-the meansto
Benigni's Life Is Beautiful,which deserves neitherits provethat(his type of) comedy can treatthe Holocaust
detractors'angered,grandmoral declarationsnor the respectfullyand suggest an outlook thattragedyis unexcessive praise of its supporters,who unhesitatingly equipped to convey. It should be noted here that Becompare it to Chaplin (!)." (23)
nigni's project, far from cheapening it, confirms the
is
aware
of
this
the
after
Holocaustas history'sworstnightmareandreinscribes
situation,
Benigni
product,
of
the
he
choice
when
made
he
a
all,
developed "pop- it in the collective memorythroughan unusualcode.
ular" comic style (comicitai popolare). Drawing a disA profoundhistoricaland culturalawarenesssustinctionbetweenhumorand"thecomic,"he likensthem, tains the script.6Takethe title, for example. The film's
andjokingly workingtitle was "Buongioro Principessa!,"a tribute
respectively,to eroticismandpornography,
declareshimself a pornographer,too physical and un- to the phrasewhich first introducesGuido's (the prosophisticated to please refined spirits. (Benigni, www )5 tagonist, played by Roberto Benigni) mythopoetic
Muchas he may seem at peace with the populismof his powerto the audience.Duringpostproduction,Benigni
comedies,Benigni has now andthenmanifestedhis re- came across the statement"Life is beautiful"in Trotsentmentat the way in which his films arerigidlytype- sky'sletters,writtenwhentheJewishCommunistleader,
cast as "low."Interviewswith him are filled with high in the seclusion of his Mexican bunker,alreadyknew
culturalreferencesthatoften surfacein his films.In fact, that his days were numbered.Trotsky'swords immehis respectfor and increasingappropriationof a tradi- diately resonatedwith the spirit that animatesLife Is
tional culturalcapital(e.g., his 1998 publicreadingsin Beautiful, and became the definitive title. As such, it
Florence,Rome, andNew Yorkof Dante'sInferno)be- operates on multiple levels. In everyday language,
trayhis anxietyover the seemingly impossiblepromo- the expression Dai! La vita e bella! (Come on! Life
tion of his comedies to a higherstatus.Benigni's desire is beautiful!)is often employedto cheersomeoneupfor a higher statusis less a symptomof ambitionthan it asks us to look at the causes of our despair from a
of a genuinewish thathis ideas on comedy and laugh- broaderperspective. "Life is beautiful"functions on
terbe takenseriously.Convincedthat"laughtercan save a cinematiclevel as well, for it links Benigni'sfilm with
us," Benigni resentscomedy's ancillaryrole (presskit Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life and the optimism
21). His latest films aim to bestow legitimacyon com- for which the Italian-Americandirectoris (in)famous.
29
Moreover,unlike "BuongiomoPrincipessa!,"the new satirist,I was no fan of his movies. Luckily,however,
titlehas no apparentdiegeticjustification,puzzlesview- I accepted, and set out to do my homework: articles,
ers, andforces themto ask questions.Benigni was cer- interviews,andmultipleviewings of the videotape.My
tainly aware that, while nobody would recognize the first impression was skeptical and had it not been for
referenceto Trotsky,the title "LifeIs Beautiful"would my responsibilities,I would not have watchedit again.
expose the film to furthercritical venom-"Can you But I did, and,as every film scholarknows, it is the secimagine anyone who actuallysurvivedthe camps say- ond viewing thattells "thetruth"abouta film. Released
ing that?"predictablyasks Peary.Had Benigni wished from the duty of following the plot and from the presto soften the prejudiceand suspicion that a film por- sure of laughing at gags unsuitedto my taste, I began
trayedby the media as "a Holocaust comedy" under- appreciatingLifeIs Beautiful'squotes,internalrhymes,
standablyaroused,he wouldhave keptthe originaltitle. and intertextuallinks. An allegoricalstructureof sorts
Evidently,artisticcriteriatook priorityover marketing was emerging.And, farfromcheapeningthe Holocaust,
the film proddedme to know more.
diplomacy.
A few people I know joked about
those
can
make
the
who
Ironically,
most out of the new title-highbrow
how they went to see the much-talked
You cainl't show
film criticsand/oracademicscholars
about,touchingfilm abouta childin the
seem uninterestedin doing so because
Holocaust,and afterhalf an hourasked
unima tginable
theirattentionlies elsewhere.Benigni's
themselves,"DidI go to the wrongthehorroreffortsarelikely to go unnoticedsince,
ater?"With the exception of two preless
show
ever
only
Is
monitions (immediately defused by
has
all
the
superficially,Life Beautiful
that
most
film
deacademics
Guido'soptimisticandchildishlynaive
t
than whlal it was.
qualities
nature)the firsthour of Life Is Beautispise. Their habitual distaste for Beful is purefarce andfairytale romance,
nigni's slapstick is exacerbatedby the
film's popularsuccess and by the feelwith no hint of the impendingtragedy.
hissed that the first half betrays
humanism
that
oozes
detractors
from
all
good, Capraesque
Inevitably,
nearly
favorablereviews (e.g., "a dazzling exposition of the the director's real interests-making people laughway in which love, tendernessand humorcan sustain and proves his facile approachto Jewish reality. Unthe human spirit under the most oppressive circum- doubtedly,the optimisticGuidois not a realisticportrait
stances").(Kotzin 40) Add to this the sentimentalism of the averageItalianJew in 1939. But even more uninherentin the story of a fatherwith his innocentchild realistic is his son Giosue (Giorgio Cantarini)hiding
in a deathcamp:it's an emotionalterrorismthatworks out in his father's concentrationcamp barrack,or the
for "them"(thepopularaudience),butnot for "us."And cryptic image of prisoners carrying anvils all day.7
if the obstacles of physical comedy, sentimentalism, Everythingin this fairytale is unrealistic,or,better,has
and media hype were not enough, Life Is Beautifulis, no verisimilitude.If we go to see Life Is Beautifulexalso, not "beautiful."Benigni is not the type of direc- pectingverisimilitude,we arein the wrongtheater.That
tor to astonish with sweeping camera movements, even sophisticatedcritics, normally suspicious of the
against-the-beat editing, non-narrativedetours. His realistic expectations typical of mass audiences, refilms are not for those who value style over content, sorted to criticizing the film on the basis of its violationsof credibility,provesthe extentto whichBenigni's
difficulty over simplicity.
is
It my contentionthat Benigni's unsuitabilityto parableasked them to do what they were unwilling to
highbrow taste prevented,prevents, and will prevent do: treatLife Is Beautifulas if it had been directedby
most highbrow critics and film scholars from taking someone they respect. To many, of course, the HoloLife Is Beautiful seriously. Which is too bad. If they caust allows for no artisticlicense; its depiction must
did, they would discoverwhatI myself was able to dis- obey the rules of tragicrealism-the only mode/mood
cover in the wake of a fortuitousevent that confirms commonly held fit for fictions on a reality that vastly
the legitimacyof my hypothesis-I know all aboutthe surpassedfiction. But "accordingto what I read, saw
intellectualbias againstBenigni's vis comica because and felt in the victims' accounts, I realized that nothI had it myself.
ing in a film could even come close to the reality of
whathappened.Youcan't show unimaginablehorrorWhenI was invitedto be the guest speakerat a preview you can only ever show less than what it was. So I
screeningof LifeIs Beautiful,I hesitated.Much as I re- didnot wantaudiencesto look forrealismin my movie."
spected Benigni's longstandingmilitancy as political (press kit 19)
30
In fact, Life Is Beautiful intentionally conceals
Guido's Jewishness for about45 minutes and rids the
film's firsthalf of tragedy.Benigni'schoice emphasizes
an uncontestedhistoricalreality-the "Italian-ness"of
the Jews, theirparticipationin Italianhistoryat all levels. The storehousethatGuido'suncle Eliseo (Giustino
Durano) lends to Guido and his friend Ferrucciohas
a bed on which Garibaldi,the symbol of the Italianunificationprocess, allegedly slept. Eliseo also mentions
an original manuscript of one of Petrarch's biographies-Francesco Petrarcabeingthe nameof the school
in which a Fascist official is to explain the Race Manifesto (a quasi-"scientific"argumentfor the existence
of anAryanrace which concludedthatsince Jews were
not Aryanthey thereforecould not be trueItalians)and
where Guido/Benignigives us a funny and intelligent
satireof racism's arbitrariness.
Until the late 1930s, ItalianJews lived, loved, and
laughed like anyone else in Italy. Anti-Semitism did
not enterofficial Fascist ideology until race laws went
into effect in 1938 (Mussolini himself had a Jewish
mistressuntil 1936). "Thevast majorityof assimilated
andnon-politicalItalianJews reactedto the raciallaws
with shock and disbelief," reports Susan Zuccotti in
what has been called the definitive study of the Holocaustin Italy.(43) Although"everyItalianJew was affected," (43) the situation was far from being
homogeneous.Therewas even the case of FascistJews
who blamed the race laws on Zionism and non-patriotic Jews. (Stille 17-90) Many Jews downplayeddiscriminationas a symptomof Mussolini's opportunism
which was aimed to win Hitler's favor and create the
possibility of forfeitureof assets as well as bribes and
corruptionItalian style. ("OnJuly 13, 1939, the governmentintroducedanAryanizationprogram,by which
a special commission could simply declare arbitrarily
that a Jew was not a Jew." [39]) In this tragic farce,
Guido's oblivious optimism constitutes an absurdresponse to an absurdreality.
The intentionalcreationof an optimisticJew who
averts his eyes from the signs of impending tragedy
is morethana reflectionon the advantagesof dis-idenreasons.By refusingto make
tity.It servesarchitectural
Guido andhis uncle Eliseo icons of a foretolddisaster,
the film lets comedy reign supremethroughoutthe first
half. Cleverly, something similar, but opposite, happens in the second. Shortly after the prisoners arrive
the camp, we have the film's funniest scene-Guido
"translates"for his son's benefitthe camp regulations,
transformingbrutalcommandsinto elaboraterules (for
survival, in fact, or, as it seems to Giosue, for winning a grand prize) and the camp guard into one of
the game's "mean guys." It is the beginning of the
"game."It is also the end of the film's vis comica, and
we practicallystoplaughing."Inthe secondhalf,there's
only one joke, the game," commented an academic
friendof mine. He meantit as a criticism.While agreeing with his observation,I do not regardit as a flawquitethe contrary.The lack of jokes is, of course,a sign
of Benigni'srespectfulrestraint.But lettinggo of comedy's primeobjective-laughter-serves architectural
reasons. It purifies,as it were, the second half, so that
tears replace laughter,fear replaces optimism.Life Is
Beautifulhas a remarkablearchitecturebecause it creates a filmic space that is virtuallysymmetrical.
It is, however, a weird symmetry. Far from producing the sense of balance and comfortingharmony
traditionallyassociatedwith it, symmetryhere disorients viewers by forcingthemto experiencethe anxiety
of an unexpected schizophrenicattack.Life Is Beautiful splices together two halves that are, in fact, recalcitrant opposites, one the negation of the other:
slapstick comedy and tragedy.The legitimacy of the
film's aspirationsto be treated seriously starts here,
in the deliberateanduncommonshort-circuitingof two
modes of representationthat may tolerate, and even
profitby, mixing,butcannotbe merelyjuxtaposedwithout seeing theiridentitiesand effects unpredictablyaltered. Life Is Beautifulis not just tragi-comicbut it is
first comic and then tragic.There is quite a difference
between thinkingof a film as a mixtureof comedy and
tragedy,the tragi-comic, or as a juxtaposition of two
symmetricalandmutuallynegatingspaces.The former
is a healthy if occasionally disturbingmix, aiming, as
a rule, to either make comedy serious by bestowing
gravity on its lightness, or, conversely, to defuse the
depressionprovokedby tragedy.The latteris uncanny
and unsettling, potentially sickening and always disorienting,insofaras spectatorsareforcedinto a schizoid
experience. In a sense, Life Is Beautiful successfully
helps its viewers to imagine what many Italian Jews
must have felt, the eruptionof absurdityandthe transformationof one reality into its opposite. This is how
Life Is Beautifulis faithfulto reality-it dramatizesits
deepestimplications.It is faithfulto realityin spiritand
not in the letter.
I proposeto look at the film's formalarrangement
as a spatio-temporalallegory. Spatially, the two opposites arekept separateandyet overdetermineone another,a bit like the Yin-Yangsymbol, where the black
and the white are well definedand symmetricallyjuxtaposed,but each containsa speck of the otheras a mementoof theirinterdependence.
Temporally,as Benigni
a
humorous
us
himself reminds through
punthatworks
31
only in Italian,we areremindedof the devastatingwis- of a heap of corpses: what looked like fog is in fact
dom of the Old Testament'smost mysteriously mod- smoke from incinerated bodies. Indeed, it would be
em book, the Qohelet:"Atime to laugh,a time to cry."8 hard to imagine a more effective way of making the
LifeIs Beautiful'sarchitecturalschizophreniasuggests first sequence resonatewith the rest of the film.
the irreconcilableduality in humanhistory.
The second sequencecontains,barelydisguisedin
Seen in the light of the film's architecturalallegory, the sudden eruption of freewheeling slapstick, a ritboth ending andbeginningdeserveattention.The end- ual invocation to the creative muses and anotherpreing seems to reproposeschizophreniaby firstviolating scriptive gesture. The scene per se is unfunny, a
and then upholdingthe rules of comedy. Predictably, predictablebrakefailurein a car speedingdownhill.In
detractorsconcentratedonly on the happyhalf, on the the allegoricalscheme,it drawsa temptinganalogybe"many,manyfromhis camp(too many)who survived" tween the zig-zagging vehicle containing the author
and who "seem immediately happy."
and the film itself. The image of a car
there
is
a
brakes that cuts through the
without
True,
(Peary)
sunny feeling
about the last few minutes of the film,
fields downhill, however silly, is then
The paradox of the
but it cannot be seen in isolation from
at once the materialsupportof a slapthe fact that Guido, the protagonistof
stick routine (it has, in other words, a
comic approach is
what is perceived as a comedy, dies.
role) and an apt allegorization
diegetic
that by setting
And the abbiamo vinto! (we won!) at
of the text as an intoxicated/intoxicatthings at a distance
the end of Life Is Beautiful is not the
ing fairy tale that will stray not only
it
a
us
that
seals
a
trivialized
from the rules of realismbut also from
happy ending
permits
Holocaust-it is the griefstrickencry of
of fairy tales themselves.
those
tougher, more active
with
which
a people marked
The thirdsequence shows Guido's
triumph
response.
for extinctiontransformedtheirdarkest
accidentalencounterwith his Princesshour into a new beginning.
to-be, Dora (NicolettaBraschi),andofThe film's beginning is retrospecfers the firstexample of what is in fact
so
that
viewers
should
be
to
true
common
threadunitingthe two halves, the one
forced
see
the
tively revealing
it again afterthe end. The credits flash on the images thingcapableof runningthroughboth "thecomic" and
in an unusually slow and unpredictablemanner,and "thetragic,"thatis, the game. The game does not start
cover three sequences. In the first, we get a shot of in the camp,it startswith the courtshipof Dora-hence
Guido,in a campuniform,walkingwith his son asleep the film's workingtitle "BuongiomoPrincipessa!"The
in his arms.Fog makesvision difficultanda voiceover game is the abilityto transformeach event into another
reminds us that the film we're about to see is a fairy story,the possibility that what happensin the unfoldtale (andthereforedemandsthe suspensionof the rules ing narrativecalled reality may have anothermeanof realism).As if to make sure that we don't miss the ing in the make-believe text spun by Guido's
prescriptionof fabuloussemioticlenses, the wordfairy imagination.
tale is utteredtwice in the space of one shortsentence.
The game opened by "Buongioro Principessa!"
Also, (Italian)viewers are immediatelyawarethatthe consists then in the art of living life as if it were an
voiceover is not Benigni's. Whose is it then? Only by allegoryto which ourimaginationcan providethe key.
the film's very end, in the scene of the "many,many, Each occurrencecan be lived in its humdrum,matertoo many"survivorsin the sun, do we find out thatthe ial significance,and/orit can also be seen as the indivoiceover is Giosue's, Guido's son, who then retro- cation of anothertext. When Guido calls out "Maria!"
of the film.LifeIs Beau- anda much-neededhouse key dropsfrom a window as
spectivelybecomesthe narrator
tiful is the grateful recollection of a son who if by magic, he is successfully superimposinghis own
commemorates his father's sacrifice in a spirit that mythical story onto normal,everydayevents. By saywould have pleased him.
ing "BuongiomoPrincipessa,"he spellbindsDorainto
Giosue's voiceover begins and ends the film, im- believingthatshe too is partof a fairytale. "Buongiomo
partinga circularshapeto it. But the firstshot's pivotal Principessa"is the invitationto entera mythicalworld
functionextendsbeyondthe voiceover.It is also a flash in which ourlife overflowswith secretconnectionsand
forward,for, some twenty minutesbefore the end, we possibilitieswithinourreach,providedthatwe awaken
returnto the same shot. Walking with Giosue in his to them.
The game, then, has a name: spirituality.Spirituarms,Guidomuttersto himself,"Whatif thiswerenothbut
a
dream?"
And
we
a
POV-shot
ing
immediately get
ality, of any kind, is going to demanda similar move
32
from you: that you stop thinking that our life has only
one dimension/reading. You can reject the game/spirituality, and roast and boast in the material world; or
you can conceive the possibility that everything that
happens here and now, in history, can be wrenched away
from a narrative that is increasingly devoid of sense,
and can be grafted onto another story, another realm.
Indeed, our take on the game depends on our willingness to take seriously the sudden eruption of spiritual
needs that characterizes this end of the millennium:
Where do we stand? And the question of Life Is Beautiful's alleged revisionism should be thus reformulated:
Is it morally legitimate, when representing the Holocaust, to suggest that spirituality provides the key to
unlock the camps' doors? The game is also at one with
the fairy tale-or better, the game consists in being able
to live your life as if it were a fairy tale, a mythical
world populated by gods and monsters. The Holocaust
was the result of Nazi terror and Judeo-Christian history; but it was also the possession of some humans by
the very demons they had unleashed. It is not a matter of choosing one reading instead of the other-both
explain what happened. That's what life as an allegory
means. That is why Life Is Beautiful's fairy tale can lift
us from the Holocaust-not because the Holocaust has
been cheapened but because our spirit has been enlarged. And furthermore, as a fairy tale, Life Is Beautiful is itself an enactment of the game. Benigni's film
is the dream that comedic imagination triggers in our
minds once we take seriously the question Guido asked
shortly before discovering the heap of corpses: "What
if this were nothing but a dream?" Differently put, the
film/fairy tale/game suggests that we regard even the
worst of nightmares as parts of a dream.
Life Is Beautiful is not the first film to try a comedic
approach for the depiction of Nazi monstrosity. Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1940, Guido's number in the
camp is the same as Chaplin's Jewish barber's), Lubitsch's To Be or Not To Be (1942), and Mel Brooks'
1983 remake of the latter had already done that. Of
course Chaplin's and Lubitsch's films were pre-Holocaust, but they can be considered as predecessors of
Life Is Beautiful. Their authors thought that comedic
spirit and laughter would constitute a weapon and a
medicine, a resilient response to an enemy who expected only tragedy's lament.
In addition to these films, a small but significant
body of literary works has dared to stray from realism and high drama to introduce "the comic": Tadeusz
Borowski's This Wayfor the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (1948!); Andre Schwarz-Bart's The Last of the Just
(1959); Jurek Becker's Jacob the Liar (1969); Leslie
Epstein's King of the Jews (1979); Aron Appelfeld's
Badenheim 1939 (1980). Art Spiegelman's Maus (1986)
successfully proved that even comics could respect the
Holocaust and provide yet another tool for the dissemination of its memory.
Of course, the crucial theoretical piece in the debate sparked by the juxtaposition of laughter and the
Holocaust is Des Pres' "Holocaust Laughter," in which
he argues that This Wayfor the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, King of the Jews, and Maus not only respected
the Holocaust in spite of their generic transgressions
but turned out to be more effective than most tragic, realistic portrayals of it. For "it's not fear and sorrow we
need more of, but undaunted vision. The paradox of the
comic approach is that by setting things at a distance it
permits us a tougher, more active response." (286) Des
Pres finds that "tragedy and lamentation affirm what is
and proceed largely in a mimetic mode" so that we are
"forced to a standstill by the matter we behold." (279)
But these three books "as works of art that include a
comic element ... give us laughter's benefits without
betraying our deeper convictions." (286) Des Pres' brilliant discussion opens up fascinating questions. If realism is all that is allowed in cinematic representations
of the Holocaust, where can we go next? Should we
expand the Schindler's List model, piling horroron horror, pity upon pity? Should we escalate the representation of violence by becoming more graphic and tragic?
Aside from the fact that realistic films may give the
false impression that the Holocaust can be represented,
"serious" comedy (which, like Life Is Beautiful and Mihaileanu's Train of Life, does not laugh at the Holocaust but against its deadening weight) may constitute
a viable option. Provided of course that we take it seriously.
Maurizio Viano teaches Italian cinema at Wellesley
College.
Different versions of this article will appear in Annali d'Italianistica, and in Jewish Social Studies.
Notes
1. Train of Life will be released in the U.S. later this year. It
played at the Boston Jewish Film Festivalin November 1998
and the Mill Valley Film Festival in October 1999. It tells
the story of a French Jewish village whose elders decide to
dodge the Nazi by "deportingthemselves."They buy a train,
make German uniforms for half of their men, and pretend
thatthe entire village is being deportedto Auschwitz, when,
in fact, the train is trying to reach Palestine. Despite its
failureto do so, thereis still a bravura,upbeatfeel to the film.
33
2. Legend has it that Chaplin, asked on the occasion of the release of The GreatDictator whetherhe was Jewish, replied:
"I don't have that honor."
3. My using Peary on Life Is Beautiful as the exemplary "bad
review," has nothing to do with what I think of his other
writings. My attack is ad positionem and not ad hominem.
Besides, his review of Benigni's film is exemplary to the
point of unconscious self-parodyand I could not avoid making him into a strawmanof sorts.
4. Stanley Kaufmann,New Republic, November 23, 1998, pp.
26-7, anothermixtureof poorly digested press kit and thundering anathemas. Kaufmanngoes so far as to suggest that
"apparentlyhe [Benigni] couldn't devise enough material
to set the whole film in the camp, so he fills the first half of
the picture with his slapstick (silhouette) adventures."
Richard Schickel, Time, November 9, 1998, pp. 116-17.
Arguing that the film "trivializes the holocaust," Schickel
suggests that "sentimentalityis a kind of fascism too, robbing us of judgment and moral acuity, and needs to be resisted."With all due respect,I would like to remindSchickel
that he writes for a magazine which is a transparentvehicle of dominantideology and as such does what he accuses
Begnini of doing: it robs its readers of judgement and, yes,
moral acuity.J. Hoberman,the Village Voice,Oct. 27, 1998,
p. 98. I mention his review here only because he ultimately
voiced a negative judgment. I have, however, no problems
with this stand, since he takes the film seriously enough
to turnthe review into a site for useful informationand stimulating opinions. When he concludes that "in its fantasy of
divine grace," Life Is Beautiful "is also nonsense," he actually uncovers what most reviews (positive or negative)
missed: the film's spiritual dimension. Indeed, it is a tribute to Hoberman'sintelligence and professionalism thathis
"negative"review does a betterjob on Life Is Beautiful than
many of the opposite sign.
5. I accessed this interview on the WWW. It can be downloaded from: http://www.isg.it/pubb/2001/inter/intben.htm.
This is one of the interviews that fueled my conviction that
Benigni has a wide range of culturalinterests ranging from
Buddha to Schopenhauer, from Dante to St. Francis, etc.
Considerations of space kept me from providing a history
of Benigni's cultural/cinematiccareer(see Simonelli & Tramontana, and Martinelli, Nassini & Wetzl).
6. Due to lack of space, I cannot discuss writer Vittorio Cerami's vital collaborationwith Benigni in the film script (cf.
bibliography on Benigni). Already a collaborator of such
directorsas Pasolini (e.g., Hawks and Sparrows) andAmelio (e.g., Open Doors), Cerami co-wrote Benigni's last four
films. Everything I say about the script must be thought
of as the result of a collaboration rather than the work of
a single auteur.
7. This image, actually,is a visual quote from Accattone. During his ill-fated attemptto reform,Accattone tries working.
He has to unload huge scraps of iron, all day. After a while,
he collapses with fatigue and exclaims, "Where are we,
in Buchenwald!"
8. Un tempo per ridere, un tempo per piangere: In Italy, film
showings include a break in the middle, the two segments
of the film being called "primo tempo" and "secondo
tempo."
34
Works Cited
Benigni, www lhttp://www.isg.it/pubb/2001/inter/intben.htm
www2http://www.france.com/mag/cinema/
the_monster/benigni.html
Bourdieu, P., La Distinction. Paris: Minuit, 1979.
Des Pres, T., "Holocaust Laughter,"in Writing into the World.
New York: Viking, 1991, 77-86.
Hoberman,J., "Nazi Business," Village Voice,October 27, 1998,
98.
Jousse, T., "Le Festival des Extremes," Cahiers du Cinema, no.
525, June 1998, 23.
Kaufmann, S., "Changing the Past," New Republic, November
23, 1998, 26-27.
Kotzin, D., "A Clown in the Camps," Jerusalem Report, October 26, 1998, 40-45.
Kun, J., "The Yiddish Are Coming," Boston Phoenix, Arts Section, November 6, 1998, 9.
Martinelli,M., Nassini, C., & Wetzl, F, Benigni Robertodi Luigi
fu Remigio. Milano: Elemond, 1997.
Peary,G., "No Laughing Matter,"Boston Phoenix, Arts Section,
October 30, 1998, 9.
Press Kit, Courtesy of Miramax Films.
Schickel, R., "FascistFable," Time,November 9, 1998, 116-17.
Simonelli, G. & Tramontana,G., Datemi un Nobel: I'opera comica di Roberto Benigni. Alessandria: Falsopiano, 1998.
Stanley, A., "The Funniest Italian You Probably Never Heard
Of," New YorkTimesMagazine, October 11, 1998, 42-45.
Stille, A., Benevolence and Betrayal. New York:Summit, 1991.
Zuccotti, S., The Italians and the Holocaust. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987.
SEXED
Film,Video, and the
Frameworkof Desire
ROBERTEBERWEIN
"This well-researched
book makesa
compellingcaseforthe importanceof
thosefilmsand videos
understanding
from current theoretical perspectives."-Peter Lehman, author,
Running Scared
TITANIC
Paper, $20.00, 0-8135-2637-X
Cloth, $50.00, 0-8135-2636-1
Anatomy of a Blockbuster
KEVINS. SANDLERAND CGAYLYN
STUILAR, EDlITIRS
"Thecultural
of TITANIC
is critically
andtheoretically
exphenomenon
butnotwithout
the
interest
of
the
reader."
amined,
losing
general
chairman
offilmstudies,
University
-JeanineBasinger,
Wesleyan
Paper,$20.00, 0-8135-2669-8;Cloth,$50.00, 0-8135-2668-X
Available in bookstores or call 800-446-9323
rI
IIn;BuI
gf